Spying raises many ethical issues, but these are rarely discussed - at least by philosophers. Cécile Fabre, author of a recent book on the topic, Spying Through a Glass Darkly, discusses some of these issues with Nigel Warburton in this episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast. This episode is sponsored by The New European newspaper.
This is philosophy Bites, with me, Nigel.
Warburton, and me, David Edmonds.
This episode of philosophy Bites is sponsored by the New european newspaper, the leading pan european politics and culture periodical.
States have practiced espionage for millennia, but philosophers have had very little to say about it until now.
By going undercover and infiltrating the deep state, I've managed to establish that Cecile Fabre is a political philosopher at Oxford and author of spying through a glass darkly.
Cecile Fabre, welcome to philosophy Bites.
Thank you for having me.
It's a pleasure.
The topic we're going to talk about is the ethics of spying.
Now, that's an unusual topic for philosophy.
Maybe we could just begin by saying what spying is.
So I think of spying in the context in which I write about it, which is the context of foreign policy conducted by political communities in general and states in particular, as the practice of trying to acquire secrets about other states, other political communities, which we think they don't want us to have.
That's how I think of espionage, which is not very controversial.
It's a standard definition.
So why do people need to do this?
Well, they need to do this because they are concerned with protecting the interests of their citizens in the context of war.
They are also concerned with ensuring, for example, that when they decide which objectives to pursue, they are not going to, by mistake, out of ignorance, deliberately target civilian populations.
They are concerned to find out when they decide, for example, to impose economic sanctions, whether the sanctions will be effective.
Quite often.
Not always, but quite often.